Tanks versus Infantry / Arty combo

[jshelr]

Can anyone help the statistically challenged individual who can't figure the odds of a vet tank attacking a vet infantry unit "protected" by an artillery? Thanks

[fittstim]

Well it's not so cut and dry as you might want to think but I'll make a stab at an answer.

It's a 50-50 proposition.

Here's why:

If the infantry is FORTIFIED and NOT on Hill/Mnt/For/Jung/City/Fortification tile, then the straight odds are:

15:16 in favor of the tank.

If the infantry is NOT FORTIFIED and not protected as described above, then the odds are:

10:16 in favor of the tank.

For/Hill/Jung/: 13:16 for tank
Mount: 15:16 for tank

The odds change in favor of the fortified infantry (sometimes heavily - fortified in a metropolis on a hill = 25:16 for the infantry = a >60% victory chance per round) dependent on the terrain.

The artillery is sort of a joke (IMO). Don't know what the ratios are but my guess is around a 25% success rate. This is provided that your artillery didn't attack during your round of attacks - otherwise it won't fire in defensive support.

[jshelr]

Thanks.

The reason I ask is that, playing as Babylon, we saw our settlers decimated by barbarians in the early game and ended up way behind the curve. The game boiled down to Russia in the middle of a complex pangea map, with survivors Japan, Rome and Babs surrounding. Russia has tanks, but is at war with everyone after a little bribery on the Babs part. The three allies are on combustion.

With nothing else to do, the Babs walked a large stack of arty/infantry into Russia's territory. Russia left them alone and they were able to decimate two cities (so far) with few infantry losses taken in the process of killing red-lined defenders. I was just wondering if the AI knew something I didn't know about tank vs arty-covered-infantry battles to explain why Russia didn't use its tank advantage to trim the infantry stack??

Your response indicates the fight is even without arty. If the arty knocks a hit point down on the tank 25% of the time, it looks like the result would shift to infantry winning more than 50%. Given relative unit costs, Russia may have a serious problem.

[Solver]

Uhmm, attacking with Infantry still doesn't seem an exciting option to me, if he defends with Infantry as well. My best bet would be to scatter the infantry around his land, pillaging stuff and getting to sit in Mountains, and also have artillery do casual bombing of cities and improvements.

[jshelr]

Solver

Your skepticism is well founded. I started this thread because I was shocked at the success of the infantry attack and wondered if others had been successful with the "infantry/arty" rush, or this was a special case.

The arty stack were able to drop every infantry defender in a city to one hit point left. After that, the infantry attackers succeeded very often and we got some promotions as well, which partly made up for the losses. "Rush" is a misleading term in this case. It's slow and a bit tedious to move and bombard.

[Random Passerby]

The infantry/artillery combo is very effective in terms of attack power; its weakness is a matter of speed alone. Your attacking infantry should never face A ratios of worse than roughly 1:3 (since you can just as easily bombard cities to rubble), but they have at least 4 hitpoints to the defender's likely 1. If you can tolerate moving at such a speed, once you catch up you might want to try an infantry/artillery/tank combo; it is all but impossible to ever take any casualties in your main offensive forces if you use your infantry/artillery stacks to bomb their defending infantry down to 1 hp and then bring in tanks.

Still, since tanks are so absurdly inexpensive to build and so vastly powerful, it's often generally more effective to just build nothing but tanks and throw them in large numbers at things until they break.

[Solver]

For the record, I really like infantry as a unit. It makes an excellent defender, it can also attack reasonably well in the field, but again, I prefer to send in some two transports of these and just scatter them around.

For my liking, though, the game has Artillery too low chances to hit their target. It should be higher somewhat, IMO.

[jshelr]

"Still, since tanks are so absurdly inexpensive to build and so vastly powerful, it's often generally more effective to just build nothing but tanks and throw them in large numbers at things until they break."

Ain't it the truth!